


Baby Love

by Gruoch



Category: Fantastic Four (Comicverse), Spider-Man (Comicverse), Spider-Man - All Media Types
Genre: Found Family, M/M, MJ is mj, Michelle is Mary Jane, Non-Traditional Families, extreme parenting boot camp, good uncle Johnny, himbo/himbo/herbo solidarity, humor w a heaping dose of angst, relationship troubles, this is my fic & I make the rules, three hopeless idiots and a baby
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-26
Packaged: 2021-03-28 09:02:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,889
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30137184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Gruoch/pseuds/Gruoch
Summary: “Felicia’s back in town,” Peter says with a kind of forced, artificial casualness.Johnny pretends not to feel the painful twist in his gut.“Oh yeah?” he replies with a similar manufactured breeziness, taking a gulp of coffee.“Yeah,” Peter says, rapidly tapping his fingers against the tabletop. He clears his throat. “She, uh...this is crazy but she had ababywhile she was away, and...she says, um…shit. She says he’s mine.”Johnny just manages to suppress the urge to do a violent spit-take and spew coffee across the table. It comes out his nose instead, scalding his sinuses and sending him into a coughing fit.****In which Peter and Johnny’s relationship veers off-course when Peter’s ex comes back into the picture with a baby in tow, and sometimes family is you, your dirtbag boyfriend, your roommate, and the baby niece youstoleborrowed from your sister.
Relationships: Michelle Jones & Johnny Storm & Peter Parker, Peter Parker/Johnny Storm
Comments: 37
Kudos: 68





	1. Chapter 1

Johnny is awoken from a dead sleep by the sound of MJ’s alarm going off through the wall that separates their bedrooms.

He rolls over onto his stomach with a groan, listening to the steady, obnoxious _braaap, braaap, braaap_ of the alarm, wondering for the umpteenth time _why_ MJ couldn’t at least pick a more gentle, dulcet sounding alarm tone if she was going to always set it to the highest possible volume and then sleep through it, anyway.

After another minute of this, Johnny lets out another groan and reaches up to thump his fist against the wall.

“Hey, asshole, wake up!” he shouts.

The alarm continues to ring for another minute even though Johnny is sure MJ is awake, because she is an absolute sadist who loves to make him suffer for his ( _very_ minor) crimes of using her expensive hair and skincare products without her permission.

But Johnny isn’t going to let the incessant buzzing get to him. Today marks the one year anniversary since he and Peter made things capital “o” Official, and Johnny has _plans_ , cheesy, romantic plans—an evening stroll through Central Park (corny, sure, but Pete likes that corny stuff), then a dinner reservation at Rao’s (which had been an absolute pain in the ass to get, despite his celebrity cache), followed by nipping over for a little foreplay sesh on Lady Liberty’s torch (the location of their first kiss, aw), all culminating with an extended trip to Pound Town (hey-yo!).

Johnny flops back down with a drowsy grin and rolls over again, blindly sliding a hand across the sheets, seeking out Peter. He finds that side of the bed empty, instead, which is disappointing with regards to anniversary morning cuddles but not surprising considering the totally whack hours Peter keeps.

Denied his sunrise spooning, Johnny decides to seize his opportunity for revenge by racing to the bathroom before MJ can get there first. He takes his sweet time showering, singing loudly and out-of-tune as he uses up all the hot water. He takes even longer to towel off, carelessly getting water all over the floor before finally topping off his ablutions by combing a liberal amount of MJ’s pricey curl defining lotion through his hair. 

Johnny flashes a grin at himself in the mirror, winking and shooting finger guns at his reflection. “Lookin’ good, hotstuff.”

He strolls down the hallway to the kitchen, whistling a cheerful tune. The whistle dies out on a low, concerned note as Johnny walks in and finds Peter sitting there at their little table. He’s still dressed in the Spider-Man suit from the neck down and his hair is standing up in unruly tufts, like he’s been tugging at it. He’s silently staring off into nothing, taking no notice of Johnny as he comes into the kitchen.

Johnny frowns, doing a quick once-over scan to make sure Peter isn’t horribly injured or something, but he can’t see anything obvious.

“Hey, babe,” he tries instead. “Rough night?”

Peter startles, blinking owlishly as he turns his head to look up at Johnny. He offers Johnny a pained smile that’s more like a grimace. “Oh, hey. Good morning. You’re up early.”

“MJ’s alarm woke me up again,” Johnny explains, still frowning as he scrutinizes Peter. 

Peter doesn’t look hurt but he still looks… _bad._ Pale. Twitchy. Scruffy—or at least, scruffier than usual. The dark circles that are permanently tattooed under Peter’s eyes look practically like a panda’s mask right now, stark against the pallor of his skin, and he’s wearing a funny expression that Johnny can’t quite get a read on, something between suppressed panic and the most profound existential dread.

“You okay, Pete?” Johnny asks, concerned. “You look kinda… _rough_ , man.”

“Huh? Oh, no, I’m great. Really good. So, so good. Everything is just— _really_ good right now,” Peter babbles. He gives Johnny a big teeth-baring smile that doesn’t quite hide the strain around his eyes.

“Oooookey-dokey,” Johnny replies, shrugging as he goes to make some coffee. Peter is definitely being weird, he thinks, but Peter is weird like ninety-eight-percent of the time so it’s hard to say how serious this really is, and getting Peter to talk about how he’s feeling emotionally is like trying to dig a hole to the Earth’s core with an uncooked hotdog. Peter could take an unbelievable pounding from an opponent three-times his size and just shake it off, but the first time he’d said _I love you_ to Johnny, he’d followed the declaration up by immediately barfing all over Johnny’s shoes and then spending the rest of the week laid up in bed with a severe stomach ulcer flare up. 

Johnny decides to wait and let MJ handle it. She could squeeze blood from a stone if she wanted to, and she knows Peter better than anyone.

He collects his coffee mug and heads back to the table, stopping a moment to attempt to smooth Peter’s messy hair down before giving up, leaning over to press a kiss into the wild tangle of curls.

“Happy Anniversary, Petey,” he murmurs warmly, straightening up to give Peter a tender smile.

Peter’s face does another funny thing at that, his expression looking almost tortured with guilt.

“You forgot, didn’t you?” Johnny asks flatly, once again disappointed but not surprised.

Peter shakes his head almost violently. “I didn’t. I swear. I just—had some other things on my mind and…”

Johnny waves a hand as he sits down at the table. “Whatever. Look—I made us a dinner reservation at Rao’s for nine sharp. I practically had to promise my firstborn child to get it, so don’t be late.”

Peter makes a strangled sound in the back of his throat.

Johnny glances up at him, eyebrow raised.

“Problem?” he prompts, a little threatening edge to his voice. 

Peter shakes his head again. He’s round-eyed and sweating. “No. Nope. Nine sharp. I’ll be there.”

He offers Johnny another big toothy grimace of a smile, like a dog trying to ingratiate itself to its master.

“Mm-hm,” Johnny grunts, sipping his coffee as he pulls out his phone and starts scrolling through his social media feeds. He cheers up a little when he sees the cheesy photo of him and Peter he’d posted to Instagram last night has racked up a few million likes. Peter is completely gun shy when it comes to fame and celebrity and only lets Johnny post his picture once in a blue moon, so Johnny’s fans go completely nuts whenever Johnny gets to throw them a little bone concerning his love life.

Peter delicately clears his throat, interrupting Johnny’s pleasant basking in the validation of internet strangers.

Johnny lifts his head, immediately feeling unsettled by the weird, carefully neutral expression Peter is now wearing.

Peter clears his throat again.

“So. Felicia’s back in town,” he says with a kind of forced, artificial casualness.

Johnny pretends not to feel the painful twist in his gut. He looks back down at his phone, staring at the screen but seeing nothing.

“Oh yeah?” he replies with a similar manufactured breeziness, taking a gulp of coffee.

“Yeah,” Peter says, rapidly tapping his fingers against the tabletop. He clears his throat again. “She, uh...this is crazy, but she had a _baby_ while she was away...she says, um… _shit_. She says he’s mine.”

Johnny just manages to suppress the urge to do a violent spit-take and spew coffee across the table. It comes out his nose instead, scalding his sinuses and sending him into a coughing fit.

“You’re kidding,” he chokes out, wheezing. _Please be kidding…_

Peter’s face is deadly, horribly serious. He shakes his head. “I’m not kidding. She named him Walter, after her dad, and, uh...he’s mine.”

Johnny blinks rapidly, momentarily at a loss for words.

“I mean...are you sure it’s yours?” he finally bursts out, slightly hysterical. “No shame intended, I gotta high body count myself, but Felicia isn’t exactly the monogamous type, if you get my drift.”

Peter takes a deep breath and starts drumming his fingers on the table again. “ _She’s_ pretty damn sure he’s mine, and the timing is right, but…”

_But Felicia’s a liar._

“But are you _sure_?” Johnny says again, clutching the edge of the table, his brain still refusing to process this information. 

Peter shrugs helplessly. “I dunno...she showed me a picture of him, and I _guess_ he looked kinda like me?”

Johnny’s eyebrows leap towards his hairline. “She showed you a picture...he _looked_ like you? Like, what—he was hanging upside-down from the ceiling? He has the Parker Dumbo ears?”

“I don’t know!” Peter says, throwing his hands up. “I said I _guess_ he could maybe, _kinda_ look like me, but it’s hard to say for sure. I mean, all new babies kinda look like baked potatoes, right?”

Johnny considers what Franklin had looked like as a newborn, and the current doughy, unmolded softness of his fresh-from-the-womb baby niece Valeria, and can’t argue with that assertion.

“Are my ears really that big?” Peter asks, self-consciously reaching up to cover them with his hands.

“They’re ridiculously huge, but that doesn’t fucking matter right now,” Johnny says, his mouth dry from panic. “Dude...Peter...you _can’t_ be a...a _dad_.”

Peter gives another twitchy shrug, looking every bit as desperate as Johnny feels. “Why not? I got all the right equipment. It takes three minutes to make a baby.”

“Three minutes? Geez, Pete, no wonder Felicia broke up with you.”

“ _That_ was an _exaggeration_ to make a point about how _easy_ it is to accidentally make a baby,” Peter clarifies forcefully.

“Yeah, exactly— _to make a baby._ It takes a lot more than a three minute pump and dump to be a _dad_ ,” Johnny stresses.

Peter clutches at the tangled nest of his hair, a look of abject horror on his face. “Fuck, you’re right! What the fuck did I do? I’m a _disaster._ I can’t take care of another human being. I’m barely able to take care of _myself._ I’m a grad school dropout drowning under piles of student loan debt, barely scraping by working as a substitute teacher in one of the most expensive cities in the world! Shit, shit, shit...I am _fucked._ My…my _kid_ is _fucked_. God...I’m gonna barf…”

Johnny feels a little like he has to barf, too.

A _baby_... _Peter’s_ baby...with _Felicia_...it’s like a soap opera, or one of those trashy, voyeuristic talk shows from the nineties, except that it’s very, very real, and it’s happening to _him_. 

Johnny swallows down the bile encroaching upon the back of his throat. He plasters what he hopes is a confident smile across his face, and then he reaches across the table to squeeze Peter’s arm comfortingly. “Hey...it’ll be okay, Petey. We can handle this.”

Peter turns huge round eyes on him, his eyebrows raised.

“ _We?_ ” he repeats, sounding on the edge of hyperventilating. “There is no _we_ here… _I_ knocked Felicia up. _I_ fathered that baby. This is _my_ responsibility.”

He pushes his chair back, standing up.

“I gotta...figure this shit out,” he mumbles. He swallows hard and presses the back of his hand to his mouth, looking sweaty and a little green around gills. “But I gotta puke first.”

He stumbles out of the room, nearly body-checking MJ as she comes in from the hallway. She shoots him a sleepy-eyed glare before turning her scathing scowl on Johnny. But her expression quickly shifts into one of concern as she looks him over.

“Okay, I was gonna rip you a new asshole for using up all the hot water, but you look like you just had to shoot your beloved childhood dog after it got rabies, the dog that you raised from a puppy, a puppy that your mother gave to you right before tragically dying herself, so I’ll refrain,” she says.

“That was weirdly specific and absurdly traumatic, but yeah, it does feel kinda like that,” Johnny says, one hand pressed to his aching heart and his eyes full of tears.

Michelle crosses her arms over her chest, her expression knowing. “What did Peter do?”

“What did Peter do? I’ll tell you what that douchebag did—he got Felicia pregnant and now she’s back in town with a _baby_ — _Peter’s_ baby. My idiot boyfriend has a surprise _baby,_ and he told me on our fucking anniversary,” Johnny blurts out in a rush. It’s really not information he has a right to reveal without Peter’s consent, but he feels like his whole world is falling apart right now and he desperately needs someone to commiserate with.

Michelle’s reaction to this life-shattering news is not at all what Johnny is expecting. Her eyes go huge and round and soft, and she clutches her hands together under her chin, a giant smile spreading across her face.

“We’re getting a baby?” she asks, nearly squealing with delight.

Johnny blinks, staring at her like he’s never seen her before in his life. “ _What?_ ”

“Aww, a baby! Did he tell you its name?” MJ continues to gush, oblivious to his distress.

Johnny presses a hand to his forehead, still rapidly blinking, feeling like reality is shifting apart at the seams. This isn’t Jerry Springer, he decides, feeling pukey and desperate again. It’s Candid Camera, and at any second someone is going to jump out and let him in on the prank. Any second now...any second…any...

Johnny sucks in a lungful of air.

“Walter,” he answers hoarsely. “I think he said the baby’s name is Walter.”

MJ clutches her hands together even tighter, her eyes glossy. “Awww! Wally...so cute. Do you think he has Peter’s big ass ears? When is he coming to stay with us?”

The question punches Johnny in the gut.

“I don’t think he’s coming to stay with us,” he mumbles numbly.

It’s Michelle’s turn to look confused now. “What? Why not?”

Johnny sucks in another breath, like a drowning man. “I dunno—‘cause Peter is Peter and has that whole stupid personal responsibility thing—except when it comes to using a condom, apparently—and he seems like the type to go back to Felicia under the dumb notion of _doing the right thing._ God, why did I have to fall for this idiot...”

MJ snorts. “Yeah, there’s no way Felicia’s gonna be on board with that. She’s not exactly the ‘move to the suburbs and settle down’ type. I don’t think a baby is gonna change that, and Peter can’t take care of an infant by himself. He’s a disaster. He needs us.”

Johnny isn’t sure that’s a comfort. A baby was definitely not something he saw in his near future. He is young, and hot, and horny, and his life is full of chaos and danger. He spends weeks at a time on the other side of the world—on the other side of the freaking _galaxy_ —fighting really bad dudes who want to murder him and everyone he loves. He doesn’t see how a baby can possibly fit into that picture.

“I don’t know why you think we’re anymore qualified to take care of a baby,” he says sourly. “Peter is a disaster, yeah, but let’s be real...so am I. So are you. Felicia is a literal _crook_. _None_ of us should be anywhere near a baby.”

“Okay, but see? That’s all the more reason that we have to help Peter,” MJ reasons. “We’re all busy, irresponsible twenty-somethings, but with our powers combined we’re the equivalent of one responsible adult. It’s math.”

Johnny frowns at her. “I can’t tell if you’re a genius or a complete dumbass. Either way, I don’t feel good about it.”

He presses a hand to his forehead again, swallowing hard. “I feel like I’m gonna barf.”

“Why are you acting so depressed? I thought you liked kids.”

“I have no problem with kids. I _do_ have a problem with my partner having a surprise baby with his criminal ex,” Johnny replies, dragging his hand down his face and looking up at MJ. “Things were _finally_ going really good between us, and this feels like a fucking megaton bomb just dropped on our heads. And _today_ of all days...I had _plans_ for our anniversary, MJ, romantic plans—the kind that involved a lot of advanced preparation, like a full-body wax and a very thorough douching. I’m talking _deep_ colon irrigation—“

“Ok, I get it—you fuck. Congratulations,” MJ interrupts, holding up a hand to stop him. “You understand that people who become parents _continue_ to have a sex life, right? Your sister didn’t produce her second child via cloning or something.”

Johnny says nothing, silenced by the hard tight lump squeezing his throat. What he wants to say is that this isn’t about sex—not entirely, at least, although he’s definitely regretting going through the pain of having his nether regions waxed for no reason, since he’s pretty sure his anniversary plans are canceled now. 

It’s not even really about Felicia. Johnny can admit that he’s a jealous person. It’s one of his major character flaws, as his sister and MJ like to regularly remind him, but like all jealousy-prone people, his issues stem from deep-rooted insecurities about his own miserable self-worth. He knows that MJ is most likely right—Felicia might be back in the picture, but she’s not likely to stick around. But her baby— _Peter’s_ baby—is a different story. Johnny knows Peter very well after nearly a decade of friendship and on-again-off-again romance, and what he knows is that Peter takes the whole responsibility and family thing Very Seriously. The baby is _definitely_ going to be a permanent part of the picture.

Johnny can only hope _he_ still gets to be part of the picture, too.

“Fuck,” he says succinctly, burying his face in his hands.


	2. Chapter 2

“Have you heard anything from Pete?” MJ asks, inspecting her reflection in the visor vanity mirror from the passenger seat of Johnny’s car.

“Nope,” Johnny says, gripping the steering wheel tighter as he navigates traffic on their way to the Baxter Building. “Not a word.”

Peter seems to be handling his abrupt entrance into fatherhood the usual way he handles any big personal problem—by cutting off all contact with his loved ones and disappearing off the face of the Earth, save for occasional blurry sightings of Spider-Man that get posted to the internet like some kind of scrawny bug-eyed cryptid. It’s as predictable as the sun rising and setting, and it makes Johnny very, very Pissed with a capital ‘P.’

MJ purses her lips, folding the sun visor back up. “Should we call his aunt?”

“Nah. It’s only been three days. I always give him a week before I start calling in the big guns.”

“Maybe he’ll come back with the baby,” MJ says hopefully. “I’m gonna spoil that booger so bad.”

Johnny releases a long-suffering sigh, squirming around in his seat. He’s having some kind of allergic reaction to the waxing he’d got for his and Peter’s wet fart flop of an anniversary, and now he has a heinously itchy rash all around his junk and along his ass crack on top of all the other misery he’s suffered since Peter told him about Felicia’s little bundle of chaos.

“Can we _not_ talk about the baby for five minutes?” he requests petulantly. “Jesus. Just shut up about it, would ya?”

MJ, who does not like being bossed around and who has done nothing but talk about the baby for the past three days straight, ignores the request. “Are you gonna tell your family?”

“Am I gonna tell my family what? That my dickhead boyfriend raw-dogged his ex-girlfriend, who also happens to be a notorious criminal, and now she’s shown up out of the blue with the living, breathing consequences of his stupidity?”

MJ rolls her eyes. “I _mean_ , are you gonna tell them you’re a brand new dad?”

The question sucker punches Johnny so hard he nearly rear-ends the garbage truck rumbling along in front of them.

“What the fuck? _No,_ ” he says vehemently. “Why the hell would I tell them that? _I_ didn’t make that baby.”

“No, but you and Peter are in a romantic relationship. You live together. You’re in love. You’re each other’s family. And now Peter is a father—ergo, _so are you,_ ” MJ points out. 

“No, no, no,” Johnny says, feeling panicky and pukey again. “Nope. I am too young and too smoking hot to be a...a...a _dad._ Dad-ish. Alt-dad. Nope. Not me, cupcake. Not anytime soon. _Definitely_ not right now. I did _not_ sign up for that.”

“So, what...you’re gonna break up with Peter?” MJ asks, frowning. “‘Cause if so, we need to start advertising for a new roommate so we can pay the rent.”

Johnny nearly rear-ends the truck again.

“Dude, what the fuck is wrong with you?” MJ says shrilly, bracing her hands on the dashboard as he slams on the brakes just in the nick of time to avoid a messy collision.

“What’s wrong with me?” Johnny replies just as shrilly, his heart pounding and his head swimming.

What’s wrong with him is that he’d been so busy worrying about Peter leaving because of the baby that he hadn’t even considered the full reality of what it would mean for Peter to _stay_. 

If Peter is in the picture, and the baby is in the picture, and Johnny is _also_ in the picture, then…

_Did I just become a dad?_

“Shit,” Johnny says, clutching the wheel with sweaty hands.

***

“How’s the fit?” Reed asks, bent over a holographic display of schematics.

“Fine,” Johnny replies distractedly, picking a wedgie out of his rashy ass crack.

Reed looks up, quirking an eyebrow.

“ _Fine?_ Really? Usually when you try on a new suit, you have paragraphs of commentary and critiques,” he says dryly. “This may be the greatest success of my engineering career if I’ve made a suit for you that’s _fine_ on the first try.”

Johnny looks down at the new suit he wears, holding his arms open. “I mean, the classic blue really brought out my eyes, but the yellow and black color scheme is pretty dope, I guess.”

Reed snorts softly, a sardonic smirk turning up the corner of his mouth. “Ah, yes, the color scheme...the _most_ important part of a functional superhero suit.”

“Well, you know, supers are a dime-a-dozen these days. Gotta set yourself apart from the Avengers and X-Men of the world somehow. Good branding is half the battle,” Johnny mutters, digging out another wedgie.

Reed snorts again. He waves a hand towards the laboratory’s wide windows as he turns his attention back to the schematics display. “Why don’t you take it for a trial run? See if it holds up under pressure?”

“Yeah, sure, I’ll do that,” Johnny says, distracted again. Reed’s new suit might hold up to pressure, but Johnny is absolutely not. He’s sweating and nauseated.

_A baby...Peter’s baby… **our** baby…_

Johnny swallows down the bile in the back of his throat and takes a deep breath.

MJ’s right, he thinks—Peter is family, and for better or worse Johnny is head-over-heels in love with that scrawny little bastard. Peter might not be ready to accept that Felicia’s little surprise is a _we_ problem quite yet, but Johnny knows that it abso-fucking-lutely is. 

And he knows he’s gotta do the right thing, too.

“How do you do it?” he blurts out.

Reed looks up again with a questioning look. “Do what? Make the suit…?”

Johnny waves a hand. “No, I mean…like...you know. Superheroing. And...fatherhood. That whole work-life balance thing.”

Reed’s eyebrows climb towards his hairline. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

“Huh? No—no. I’m just…asking for a friend,” Johnny says lamely, offering him a pained smile.

“Uh-huh. A _friend_ ,” Reed says flatly, clearly unconvinced. He drags a hand down his face, sighing. “Please tell me this doesn’t involve one of your intergalactic conquests. The idea of negotiating custody across the vast distance of space is already giving me a headache.”

“What? No, this is close to home,” Johnny assures him. _Very close to home._

“And I seriously didn’t knock anyone up, so chill,” he adds, which is true even if it’s not the full story. “I’m just...curious, is all. I mean, it’s gotta be tough to have a family while doing this job, right?”

“It is, yes,” Reed agrees, rubbing a hand over his beard contemplatively. “But I also think, truly, that having Franklin and Valeria in my life has made me better at it. What we do as the Four...before, the idea of protecting this world and our home galaxy was just a noble abstraction. Now, though...I have a personal stake in it. I’m not fighting for any political ideology, or selfish personal gain, or guilt masquerading as responsibility. I can honestly say I’m motivated by love—pure, unconditional love. I’m fighting for Frankie and Val, so they can grow up in safety and peace. I’m fighting so I can come home to my family. Can you imagine a more worthy cause? A greater reward?”

“Nope. That sounds pretty rad, bro,” Johnny says thickly, his throat tight and his vision blurry with tears. He blinks them away and coughs into his fist. “Anyway...cool talk. I’m gonna go take this hot little number for a test drive now.”

“Yes, yes,” Reed says, waving him off and returning once more to his work. “Send me your notes.”

“You know I will,” Johnny says as he flames on, the breeziness of his tone belying the gravity of the thoughts churning inside his mind.

***

Johnny heads straight to his sister’s apartment where he’d dropped MJ off, instead, striding down the hall with a determined set to his shoulders, even though his heart is fluttering against his sternum like a panicked bird bashing itself against the walls of its cage.

He stops in front of the apartment door and wipes away the anxiety sweat beading along his upper lip before knocking.

MJ opens the door with baby Valeria cradled in her arms.

“Come on, let’s go,” Johnny says briskly, skipping over a greeting. “We gotta talk.”

“I can’t leave. I told your sister I’d watch the baby while you were trying on your suit. She took Frankie to the park.”

Johnny’s eyebrows jump up, incredulous. “Susie trusted _you_ to be alone with her newborn baby?”

“ _Yeah_ , she did, asshole,” MJ shoots back tartly. “Although to be fair, she looked so exhausted I think she would have handed this baby off to anyone.”

She looks Johnny over, narrowing her eyes. “What’s going on? Why do you look so sweaty and gross?”

Johnny grabs her by the shoulders, looking her square in the eye. He wets his lips. “MJ...I’m gonna do it.”

“Do what?”

Johnny takes a deep, quavering breath, squeezing her shoulders. “I’m gonna tell Peter to bring his baby home.”

MJ’s eyes go big and soft and glossy again. “You are?”

“Yep. We’re a family—you. Me. Peter. The baby. Felicia, I guess. We’re in this together,” Johnny says firmly, even though he’s feeling the urge to barf again. He forges through it. “We just gotta somehow convince Peter that this is the best way to go, because we both know he’s got brain worms a mile long and he’s gonna be an idiot about it. He’d rather shove a cactus up his ass than let anyone help him. We can’t let him get away this time.”

MJ nods, looking from him to Valeria, her lips pursed in thought. Then she nods again, her expression turning determined. “Okay, I got an idea.”

Johnny looks back at her with wide eyes, feeling a wave of hope. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. Listen—we take your niece home with us right now, and we feed her, bathe her, change her, et cetera, thereby showing Peter that we are serious, capable adults who can be trusted with the care and rearing of a baby.”

Johnny drops his hands from her shoulders, the wave of hope deflating as quickly as it had arrived. 

“Let me get this straight...your plan is we kidnap a baby in order to prove to Peter that we can be trusted with a baby,” he says flatly.

MJ rolls her eyes. “I didn’t say anything about kidnapping. I meant we _borrow_ Val for a few days, and we do such an amazing job taking care of her that Peter is comforted into letting us keep his baby with us at home as one big happy family.”

“It’s a _baby_ , MJ, not a stray puppy we found dumped on the side of a road,” Johnny says, exasperated. “I think you have brain worms, too.”

MJ scoffs. “Okay, flamebrain, what’s _your_ brilliant idea, then?”

Johnny has no ideas, just the unyielding belief that while Peter might suck ass harder than anyone on the planet, he’s still the best thing that’s ever happened to Johnny, and Johnny would rather _die_ than keep going knowing that Peter is out there somewhere living a life without him.

He sighs and then holds his arms out. “Alright. Give me that baby. Let’s do this.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! I live for comments. You can also find me on tumblr as [groo-ock](https://groo-ock.tumblr.com)


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